


to be honest, to be yours

by smokesque



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Canon Compliant, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Torture, Light Angst, M/M, One Shot, this is just 1k words of me supporting andreil so much it hurts, various canon warnings apply (smoking / drinking / allusions to torture)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-12
Updated: 2017-10-12
Packaged: 2019-01-16 07:50:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12338496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smokesque/pseuds/smokesque
Summary: "I'm fine," Neil says and the words bend so far they snap clean in two.*(in which neil learns how to tell the truth, one kiss at a time)





	to be honest, to be yours

**Author's Note:**

> i read aftg in the span of four days, cried myself to sleep, woke up to reread half of the king’s men, and wrote this in a restless fit of tears because i didn’t know whether to laugh or cry but i did know i felt like writing for the first time in months. so there’s that. (also it took me weeks to edit this because every time i came back to it i hated it a little bit more but ?? it’s something at least)
> 
> at some point i suppose i’m going to have to start producing content that isn’t just rewrites of canon with poorer word choice. this is not that point.

It’s what comes after that counts. After fighting tooth and nail for the chance to catch a breath. After finding a family and letting it go before he knew what he had. After losing and losing and maybe finally winning. After running, after staying. It’s what comes after that counts, because what comes after is Andrew on the rooftop, cigarette between his lips and vodka between his legs. Neil takes the bait without having to be invited. The rustle of his jacket as he settles himself isn’t cause enough to warrant Andrew’s attention and they sit in proverbial silence, clouds of smoke and an endless expanse of twilight between them. Andrew offers a pack of cigarettes, but Neil plucks the half-burnt one from between Andrew’s fingers instead. He doesn’t smoke it, content to leave it hanging in his slackened grip – close enough that Andrew could take it back if he wanted, but he doesn’t. So they sit. They stay.

Expectedly, it’s Neil who breaks the steady silence they fall into, who shifts infinitesimally and cracks his lips on a puff of warm breath. And he knows better, perhaps, than to make this about exy; to appeal to a better nature Andrew doesn’t have when it comes to court walls and racquets and statistics; to expect anything less than a sigh, than an eye roll, than being shut out ( _again_ or _still_ or _maybe there’s nowhere to be let into_ ). He knows better, but when has that ever stopped him before?

“We’ll still win,” he says before he can stop himself, because this matters, this is what he wants and needs and it’s why he came, why he stayed, why everything makes sense finally. It’s almost worth it, until Andrew’s throat clears a warning, an almost inhumane growl, and Neil thinks  _This is why they call him monster_. It’s unbidden – dark and dangerous to think like that – and it tears him open from the inside out, where the sharpest blades and deadliest flames could never reach him. He pushes the thought down where he hides parts of himself that still know how to wield a knife, that still live on blood and terror in a basement in Baltimore, and bites his tongue.

Andrew doesn’t ask how Neil is doing, doesn’t say anything at all. He just looks, with a cock to his head like he might be vaguely interested, and searches out the answers in whatever he finds in silence. He says nothing. Neil hears him anyway.

“I’m fine,” Neil says and the words bend so far they snap clean in two. Andrew doesn’t look at all impressed. He steals the cigarette back from Neil’s loose hold and takes a contemplative drag, his gaze never once leaving Neil. He blows a plume of smoke directly into Neil’s expectant face, flicks the stub disinterestedly behind him, and finally,  _finally_  inches closer. At no point does their skin connect, but Neil can feel heat radiating in static waves between them without needing to press. All at once, the chilly night air means nothing.

“I thought I told you to stop lying to me,” Andrew says, close enough for Neil to hear the ragged edge to his tone, to feel the heavy heat behind his words.

“You don’t control me,” he says simply, even though they both know he’d turn around and step right off this building if Andrew asked it of him, albeit with a hand around Andrew’s throat as well. It doesn’t matter because Andrew doesn’t,  _wouldn’t_ , ask. Because there are lines all over their not-relationship that neither of them will cross and they start and end with asking too much.

“One hundred,” Andrew reminds him, as if Neil ever stood a chance of forgetting, as if he has space in his thoughts for anything other than  _Andrew Andrew Andrew_. Whatever response his tongue prepares in his steed dies on his lips when Andrew replaces it with his own mouth.

It’s still an endless battle, kissing Andrew. A fight to have this, to hold on for as long as he can. But Neil isn’t scared anymore, because now he has more months than he has fingers and infinitely more chances. He can see where they began but not where they end, where they’re going but not where they’ll cease. For the first time, forever feels like a viable option.

Andrew kisses like he tells the truth: all at once and without remorse. The honesty grates Neil raw, leaves him open and gasping, drags everything to the surface and lets it spill out in the press of his lips, in the twist of his hands.

“Yes or no?” Andrew mumbles, the words falling directly into Neil’s mouths where they are still melded together. He waits for Neil’s desperate plea, his  _yes, yes, always yes_ , before he pulls back – still crowding Neil’s personal space with his bruised lips and too-dark eyes, but far enough that they can swallow one another’s uneven breaths in a silent bid for oxygen.

“You are not fine,” Andrew says, kisses Neil once hard, and disappears from the rooftop.

The cousins’ dorm room is surprisingly, blissfully, empty when Neil traces Andrew’s footsteps inside. He doesn’t ask, just locks the door behind them and lets Andrew press him up against it until the world starts to spin and he forgets every iteration of himself but this one. Here. Now. Neil. He is  _Neil_  and Nathaniel is gone, is dead, is buried in a basement miles away and in thoughts Neil doesn’t recognise as his own. Nathaniel is a line they don’t cross, is a no, but Neil is here and Neil is a  _yes yes always yes_.

Andrew takes Neil apart with soft breaths ghosting over parts of his skin that have only ever seen violence. Instinct has him bracing his body for a marring that doesn’t come, replaced by gentle fingertips, and whispered questions, and promised consent. It feels like the backseat on the I-85 halfway to Columbia, like the hush of a crowd right before the first serve sends the court into mayhem, like the cool metal of a key pressed into the palm of his hand.

The silence is easy to fall back on, slipping between them as before, though not as heavy, not as strained. And when Andrew cocks his head this time, roaming gaze asking questions Neil doesn’t know how to answer just yet, Neil tries for a little bit of honesty. He thinks, after everything, they deserve this, when it’s quiet and just the two of them in empty spaces and forgotten thoughts. He thinks it’s a start at least.

“I’m not fine yet. But I think maybe I will be.”

Andrew’s hands, dancing across vacant expanses between them in lieu of a cigarette to hold, still at the words, at the truth packed so tightly into sentences as foreign to Neil as Japanese. He knows what this means, what Neil is giving him, offering like a truce between secrets spilled without his consent. Andrew knows, and it shows in the almost-expression gracing his features for the briefest of moments.

“Better,” he says, and he means better honesty than lies spiralling out of control; better here in safety than forced out in the open where it leaves him raw and vulnerable; better with the family he chose than the one he was born into; better staying than running; better foxes than butchers. And though the truth is tender to Neil’s tongue, serrated edges he is yet to grow familiar with, he’s starting to realise he could get used to this.

Because whatever this future has in store for him is better than bleeding out on his father’s basement floor, and a rag-tag family of rough edges and broken glass is better than none.

**Author's Note:**

> hmu (me up) on tumblr @ [niickyhemmick](https://niickyhemmick.tumblr.com/) bc i'm sad and lonely


End file.
